Remote access /monitoring software.

Deleted User 234324 · 6 Apr 2022 at 14:19

A family member recently told me they suspect their ex partner of snooping on their laptop.

An initial rather basic inspection found nothing but a bit of digging in the hidden folders of windows found a piece of software called centrastage.

From what I can gather it is for remote deployment, monitoring and access of school systems. This is a private laptop and would have no need for such software.

Digging further I found several log files which include the name of the person who had been accessing the data.

So suffice to say I'll be notifying the relevant people of this illegal access.

Question is though it won't let me remove the software, it can't be uninstall and just trying to delete the files prompts me with not having admin rights for it even though I am logged in as the administrator.

Is there a way around this or should I just reformat and install Windows from scratch?.

Blue160 · 6 Apr 2022 at 14:29

If you’re notifying the police shouldn’t you leave it as it is? If you remove it or reformat surely you’re removing the evidence.

Liquid_Entity · 6 Apr 2022 at 14:31

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Deleted User 234324 · 6 Apr 2022 at 15:19

Blue160 said:
If you’re notifying the police shouldn’t you leave it as it is? If you remove it or reformat surely you’re removing the evidence.

Other than a reformat, I cannot remove the software anyway. Will be talking to the relative later on to see what they want to do. Personally yeah I'd go straight to the police.

Nanobot · 7 Apr 2022 at 10:44

Recommend Autoruns to examine all areas where a program could startup during boot and login, although to be mindful of not updating any more time stamps of files and folders…
I wonder what raised suspicions of snooping. You could always block apps in firewall or router. If it’s not PC based, perhaps partner knows email account password and suspicions are email based (or social media accounts) or could be something tablet or phone based if there are other devices.

Deleted User 234324 · 7 Apr 2022 at 10:54

Nanobot said:
Recommend Autoruns to examine all areas where a program could startup during boot and login, although to be mindful of not updating any more time stamps of files and folders…
I wonder what raised suspicions of snooping. You could always block apps in firewall or router. If it’s not PC based, perhaps partner knows email account password and suspicions are email based (or social media accounts) or could be something tablet or phone based if there are other devices.

Their partner started making comments about things they should not have known about, and the only logical reason why they would is they somehow had access to the family members online accounts and/or laptop data.

So they asked me to take a look as I used to be a network/IT engineer.

Thankfully their partner was a big enough idiot to not hide the access attempts at all and in fact left access logs for the program completely in tact which include the date/time, ip address, login details and even name scattered around, even detailing the files they accessed.

ED209 · 8 Apr 2022 at 07:57

If you have notified the police surely you would want to leave it in the current state as evidence for them against the person who has done this?